Solution:

results:

The Business Challenge

Like many organizations in the public sector, Warrington Collegiate receives
reduced funding during slow economic times. Like most IT teams in the public
sector, Warrington Collegiate’s team is asked to do more with less and provide the
same level of service and support.

Nick Smeltzer, Director of IT Services for Warrington Collegiate, and his colleagues
proved they could do more with less through virtualization. “Virtualization was
definitely the right path for us, but we couldn’t find a cost-effective and reliable
backup solution that provided fast file-level recovery for multiple operating
systems, not just Windows,” he said. “Without solid data protection, we didn’t feel
comfortable virtualizing mission-critical systems, but we knew that expanding our
virtual environment was one of the best ways to conserve energy and save money.”

The Veeam Solution

Smeltzer and his colleagues chose Veeam® Backup & Replication™ to protect their
virtual machines (VMs). “Veeam is fast, cost-effective and easy to use, not to mention
reliable, which means we can sleep at night,” he said. “Veeam is the reason we
expanded our VMware infrastructure to include mission-critical systems.”

Nearly 100 percent of Warrington Collegiate’s IT infrastructure has been virtualized,
resulting in six hosts and 80 VMs that run every system needed for day-to-day
operations, including financial applications, web and email servers, and a student
records system.

“The IT team also supports 7,000 students and 450 staff,” Smeltzer said. “And this
is where Veeam is really helpful once again. When tearful students come to us
because they lost Word files, or if one of our database administrators inadvertently
drops a table from SQL Server, we can retrieve the file, any file, from any operating
system in minutes. Our previous backup solution backed up to tape, and recovering
a file from tape could take up to two hours. Veeam lets us back up directly
to the storage area network, so file-level recovery takes two minutes rather
than two hours, making us heroes.”

Veeam Backup & Replication helped Warrington Collegiate’s IT team achieve
hero status again during a disaster recovery audit. Since the college receives
government funding, the team must prove it can recover data in the event
of a disaster. “We received a glowing report,” Smeltzer said. “The auditors
told us they had complete faith in our ability to recover files fast,
and that’s because of Veeam.”

Warrington Collegiate’s IT team isn’t the only hero on campus. The Facilities team
is heroic as well. The IT and Facilities teams combined conservation efforts, leading
the college to multiple national awards and recognition for boosting energy
efficiency, increasing sustainability and reducing the campus’ carbon footprint.
In only 12 months, their efforts helped reduce the college’s electricity consumption
by 600,000 kilowatts (6.7 percent), saving approximately £10,000.

The Results

Fast, frequent and reliable backupsVeeam Backup & Replication is built specifically for virtual environments to provide
fast and reliable backup and recovery of VMs. Veeam technology enables lightningfast
incremental backups at Warrington Collegiate, which minimizes backup time
and allows for more frequent backups. “We are confident that our data is fully
protected with Veeam,” Smeltzer said.

File-level recovery from any file and operating systemVeeam Backup & Replication lets the IT team at Warrington Collegiate quickly
recover a guest file directly from an image-level backup without having to extract
the backup and restore the VM.

Expanded VMware environment decreases energy consumption, wins accoladesThe IT team at Warrington Collegiate said it wouldn’t have expanded the VMware
environment to include mission-critical systems without a fast and reliable backup
solution. “Veeam Backup & Replication has enabled us to extend virtualization
and decrease our energy consumption, which saved money, reduced our
environmental impact and earned us several Green awards,” Smeltzer concluded.